Friday, January 31, 2014

Clericalism
is as dead as yesterday’s road kill, at least the clericalism to which we are
accustomed. By clericalism, I mean an elite class who arrogate to themselves
the decisions of other men’s souls. There will always be such classes, I fear,
but they change. Today’s servants become masterstomorrow.

I don’t think that the sense of the diocesan priest as a
member of class apart is easy to find, at least among diocesan priests. Priests
are pretty much a despised class at the present. Not long ago if, after hours,
you called our diocesan center here in Frostbite Falls, you heard a recorded
message that gave you two numbers: one to call if you suspected your priest of
hanky-panky and the other if you suspected your priest of financial
skullduggery. There are swarms of lawyers, supervisors, auditors etc. milling
about to make sure that nothing untoward is going on in the lives of the
clergy. It’s really hard to form a cabalistic elite when you are constantly
filling out forms to make sure that you are on the up and up.

Diocesan priests are certainly not a power elite these days.
We are answerable to financial auditors, performance review auditors,
compliance auditors, vicars, deans, agency heads, and if all else fails, to the
local bishop. I am not allowed to physically touch money, except for that which
is clearly my own. I am responsible to raise the stuff, but I am never in
actual physical proximity to the stuff for which I must regularly beat the
bushes. The money is managed by non-ordained people, for which I am grateful,
but it has gotten really tough to skim anything off the top these days.

To
form an elite it necessary to gather together to make the proper political
connections. Schmooze is an absolute necessity to a clerical system. I remember
the good old days of clericalism especially the dinners — jumbo shrimp and an
open bar. Sometime during the early 80's things shifted from jumbo shrimp and
martini’s to trail mix and diet soda. I knew then that the good old days of
clericalism were over. We no longer go to grand gatherings of the clergy. We go
to meetings; coffee, cookies and an agenda. And if there is a dinner, one has
to leave early because there is always an appointment back at the rectory. Who
has time to schmooze? There is always some emergency that is more important
than getting together with one’s confreres.

The acquisition of status, power and wealth is the
purpose of clericalism. There is certainly not much status and not much power
or wealth to acquire anymore, and who has the time to acquire it? There is too
much work waiting back at the parish. I don’t want power status or wealth. I
just want a good night’s sleep most of the time.

This
is not to say that the mushroom of clericalism is dead. It has just begun to
emerge in other dark, moist corners. In times past, one could find ambitious
clergymen in diocesan bureaucracies. Now the downtown offices are full of
non-ordained people some of whom are saints and servants. Priests have a very
limited tenure in their assignments. These days the usual maximum for a
pastoral assignment is 12 years. Then a pastor must move. It is “better’ for
the priest and “better” for the parish. One would not want a priest to get
stale, or to create his own little kingdom.

In times past, a pastoral assignment was expected to be for
life and Father would usually be taken out of the rectory feet first, to the
sorrow of some and the rejoicing of others. Now, a pastor must submit his
resignation at the age of 70. There is a swell party and then Father is shown
door and wished good luck. In our diocese there is a generous pension of about
a thousand a month. Ah, the power and status of the clergy!

As I mentioned above, there is a class of people in the
diocese who do not have a necessary retirement age. They are the dedicated
servants of the diocesan agencies. They usually work just down the hall from
the bishop and they are his close collaborators. I am sure that they will learn
from the mistakes of the presbyterate and will avoid ambition and careerism. I
know that they are incapable of financial or amorous wrongdoing, because they
are lay people.

The
Vatican is working to achieve greater transparency and efficiency, the very
opposite of clericalism, by hiring top flight professional companies to assist
in its work, which companies also I’m sure are incapable of wrongdoing, because
they, too, are lay people. The Vatican has tapped the consulting firm of Ernst
& Young (motto: building a better working world) to provide business
advice. McKinsey & Company will help manage the Osservatore Romano, Vatican Radio, and Vatican Television. The
Swiss accounting firm KPMG will help modernize the Vatican’s finances.
This should be interesting.

I love
obscure history. Don’t you? Did you know that the first bishop elected pope, that
is the bishop of Rome, was Marinus the First? He was elected pope in 882.
Formerly, he had been the bishop of Caere, in effect an auxiliary bishop of
Rome. This caused huge scandal. Popes were generally taken from among the
deacons and sometime the presbyters of Rome. A bishop was never named pope. A
bishop never transferred from one diocese to another.

A bishop wears a ring, I have been told, because he is
married to his diocese. For a bishop to change diocese was tantamount to
adultery, or so the first millennium of Christians believed. Marinus managed to
hold on to the job of Pope for about a year and a half.

After him they chose a
saint, St. Adrian, then a priest of Rome. After him, Stephen V seems to have
done a decent job for a few years, but then the church sank into a quagmire
that made the Borgias look tame. The papacy became the play thing of the powerful families of
Italy whose sons had already risen to high clerical office. It soon became the
rule to elect a bishop and they elected some doozies. Pope Formosus (891-896)
seems to have been a decent enough fellow, but got entangled in politics and
then it was a free for all. Formosus was succeeded by Boniface VI who
mysteriously managed to live only for about two weeks. He was succeeded by Stephen
VI who was friends with the politicians that Formosus had offended, so
Formosus’ corpse was dug up, put on trial, stripped of the papal vestments and
thrown in the river. I am not making this up. It just gets worse.

The Lord in
His mercy eventually reformed things, but the precedent had been set. A bishop
clearly had power not only in the church but in the world and the politics of
Europe. The papacy were inextricably bound up with European politics until
fairly recently. Considering what was at stake, we Catholics can be very proud
of the fact that relatively few popes were corrupt. In our time we have had a
string of amazingly holy popes. May it always be so.

This
great shift in the nature of the episcopacy meant that the bishops of Europe
had a lot to do with who ruled Europe. There was power, wealth and status to be
had, and there were second sons of the nobility who looked at the church as
reasonable and lucrative career choice, since they could not inherit the titles
that went to their older brothers. In fact, in 1462 my ancestral home town in
Lower-Upper Hessia backed the wrong candidate for bishop in a shooting war
between Bishop Dieter of Isenberg and Bishop of Adolf of Nassau as to who would
be the Archbishop of Mainz. You see, the Archbishop of Mainz got to vote for
the Emperor. Both Dieter and Adolf wanted to trade up. There are three
cannonballs enshrined in the wall of our village church to commemorate the
siege by Bishop Adolf. Now these things are no longer done with cannons.
Meetings are the more appropriate battle field. Ah, good times!

I
write all these complaints simply to say that perhaps the presbyterate isn’t
the group to worry about at the moment. There are other areas of church
governance that still come with some wealth power and status, and I hope
that involving non-religious secular financial institutions in the governance
of the church is a good idea. It didn’t work so well in the middle ages, but
maybe things are better now. I have to go now. I have a meeting and a dinner,
but I can’t stay for the dinner because I have a confirmation class and then a
bible class.

Friday, January 24, 2014

Our new pope seems
to have an interesting way with words. Just the other day he said the “heart is
a flea market of desires.” I suppose I know what this means, but I am more
concerned by his referring to the clergy as butterfly priests and little
monsters. Can you shed some light on what he means?

Yours,

Ms. Ann Salting

Dear
Ann,

Of
course I can shed some light on the issue — or at least lay down a good smoke
screen. Personally, I think the papal
candidness is an absolute hoot. I have
known a few crabby old Jesuits, and personally, I find them refreshing.
Remember that, at least in my ancestry, I am a German. We have always esteemed
crabbiness.

People
say that the former pope was German, but we true Germans did not consider him a
German. He is a Bavarian, and Bavarians are far too nice. I have known a few
people who know him. They say that he is actually kind to a fault, despite what
the air-heads of the press would have us believe. He really listens to you and
makes you feel important.

The
new pope has a more obvious form of the common touch. In his heart, he is just
a parish priest. He is always taking pictures with people. I know four people
who have posed with him for snapshots since his election as pope. You would be
amazed at how much of a parish priest’s life is taken up by smiling for photos.
He is a parish priest, and being one myself I know what wacky pieces of work we
can be. We sometimes say the darndest things. And then wish that we hadn’t. Let
me dig up the exact quotes.

Pope Francis seems
to have said that poor formation in seminaries will create priests who are “little
monsters.” He went on to say, "To avoid problems, in some houses of
formation, young people grit their teeth, try not to make mistakes, follow the
rules smiling a lot, just waiting for the day when they are told: 'Good, you
have finished formation.' This is hypocrisy that is the result of clericalism
which is one of the worst evils.”

He
said on another recent occasion “...What is the place of Jesus Christ in my
priestly life? Is it a living relationship, from the disciple to the Master, or
is it a somewhat artificial relationship... that does not come from the
heart?....We are anointed by the Spirit, and when a priest is far from Jesus
Christ he can lose this unction.... Those who put their strength in artificial
things, in vanity, in an attitude... in a cutesy language... ‘This is a
butterfly-priest,’ because they are always vain.”

Wow!
He doesn’t mince words. And I think he is absolutely correct in his assessment.
As you know, not many people call me a liberal. I am somewhere to the right of
Torquemada on some theological and liturgical issues. My fellow reactionary
curmudgeons always think the pope is aiming at them. I’m not so sure. I have
met smarmy, little-monster, butterfly priests on both sides of the imagined
liberal/conservative divide. I am delighted to see a young priest in a cassock.
I get nervous, however when that cassock has no bulges at the knees indicating
that its wearer never prays, and it has no wear at the wrists indicating that
he never does much hard work. I believe that all young priests should be
familiar with the Tridentine Mass. For a priest to hand down the tradition, he
has to know the tradition. However, when a priest who doesn’t know a word of
Latin thinks it impressive to throw some Latin into the liturgy, I am tempted
to wonder, does he realize that he is supposed to be praying at Mass? If
someone loves the old Mass because it is a vehicle of the mystical spirituality
that is a huge part of the Tradition, I couldn’t be happier. If it is simply a
delight in smells and bells and funny hats, with glitter and brocade on the
side, best to let it go. To love beauty in the service of the Lord is noble. To
love kitsch in the service of narcissism is, well, monstrous. I can hear all
eight of the traditional uber-Catholics
who read this stuff beginning to grumble. Don’t worry I am now going to
lambaste the ecclesial left.

I
am equally amused by the young progressives, most of whom are in their late sixties
who go about wearing sandals and serapes and burlap vestments in order to
express their solidarity with the poor. The poor are tired of wearing serapes
and sandals. That’s why they are up here working three jobs at once. They would
like to wear Brooks Brothers some day. I had to endure the Viva la Raza crowd for years in my seminary days and early
priesthood. These were the priests and seminarians who had seen the movie, The Magnificent Seven one too many
times. (Magnificent Seven is a movie in which a bunch of gun-toting American
cowboys save a Mexican village from a blood-thirsty group of banditos. Personally I am hoping that
Mexican villagers will save us Americans from our own materialism. It’s not
looking good. A lot of the Mexicans turn into materialists after a few years
north of the Rio Grande. Still, I have hope. At least the Mexicans still love
their children more than they love their poodles.)

As
far as I am concerned a priest who cannot be devoted to the Lord, the Lowly,
the Liturgy and Our Lady is, as the pope says, liable to become a little
monster who demands that the faithful do and think what Father tells them to
think. Believe me, the serape wearing, Viva
la Raza crowd has a lot of very strict rules. I am sure you have heard that
old saying, which I myself made up, “There is no one so conservative as a
liberal.” Well, someone has to make up old sayings at some point, and I did
make it up a few years ago. In my youth I endured the tyranny of liberalism.

There
were seminarians who were tossed for being too pious. I am not making this up.
If a young man went to daily Mass in the eighties and said the rosary, he was
suspect. You toed the line if you wanted to be a priest. It was not much better
after ordination. I remember being at a meeting of the Hispanic Priests
Fellowship of the Diocese of Frostbite Falls sometime during the seventies.
These were priests who were devoted to wearing serapes and living in solidarity
with their poor Hispanic rectory housekeepers and janitors. The level of group
think was amazing. I looked around at those in attendance at the meeting and
realized that there was not one person of the twenty or so in the room who
actually spoke Spanish as a first language or who even had a single Hispanic
chromosome in their bodies. I said, in humor, so I thought, “Perhaps we should
call ourselves the Irish Priest Fellowship.”
Chairman Ron Deadly, president, guru and bellwether of the group turned
pale and said, “No, Never, Not Ever. No, No, No!!!” Here we see a striking trait that the extreme
left has in common with the extreme right — they are humor impaired. We of
course boycotted grapes. These were the days of Cesar Chavez and the migrant
worker strikes. To admit to being a serial killer in this group was less
offensive than to be caught with grape jelly on your breath, depending of
course on whom were serial killing. (For those who are humor impaired I am
kidding here, but it would have been quite a faux pas to have served grapes at one of their lunches.)

There
was no room with this bunch for novenas and rosaries and processions etc. Those
were archaic, monarchical, superstitious, medieval, oppressive, manifestations
of a bourgeois spirituality that existed only to oppress THE PEOPLE.
Remember that St. Karl of Marx had warned us against religion, the
opiate of the people. It didn’t matter a fig that THE PEOPLE loved novenas and
rosaries and processions and all that other old stuff. We had to bring them out
of their medieval darkness. Some of us would condescend to allow these
devotions if they were suitably folkloric and accompanied by scantily clad
Aztec dancers whirling about dressed in feathers while carrying bean pots that
belched incense that smelled vaguely like burning cat fur. I promised myself
that the first time someone whipped out a basalt sacrificial knife for cutting
out human hearts in honor of Our Lady Guadalupe, I was out of there.

I
personally believe that churches should be beautiful and vestments should be
glorious, and the music should be majestic because the church is the one place
where the poor man can sit next to the millionaire. The grandeur is for the
Lord and for the poor. The rich have palaces enough, but a Catholic church
should be a palace for the poor and for their carpenter-king. The serape and
sandals crowd stripped the churches down to the bare bones and removed the
beautiful statues and art. They thought that the poverty of the churches would
make the poor feel at home. The poor have enough ugly. We took away the beauty
of the liturgy that nurtured and uplifted them. They abandoned the Catholic
churches that they found cold and sterile and joined evangelical and
Pentecostal churches that allowed a more emotional expression of faith. What we
did back then was indeed monstrous.

However,
the smells and bells crowd is no more or less monstrous than the serape and
sandals crowd. Both look at the liturgy as a wonderful venue for their own
brand of performance art. The pope warns against hypocrisy. Hypocrisy is an
ancient Greek word the means play acting. A hypocrite is an actor. Nothing
more. Of course an actor needs a good costume.
Sandals and serape will do just as well as glitter and brocade. If you
wear the serape or the brocade chasuble because you love Jesus and His Bride,
the Church, all well and good. If you are doing it to make a statement, or just
because you think you look good in a serape or a fiddle-back, brocaded chasuble
maybe it’s time to go on a forty-day silent Jesuit retreat.

Friday, January 17, 2014

In
the Bible it says in Matthew 1:23 (and in the Old Testament) “a virgin shall
conceive, and they shall name him Emmanuel.” In Verse 25 it also says to name
the child Jesus. So why does the Bible use both names and how did they know to
choose Jesus. I know that Emmanuel means “God with us” and Jesus means “God
saves”, but why the name Jesus and not the name Emmanuel to fulfill the
prophecy?

Yours
truly,

Jimminy Piveau

Dear Jimminy,

The texts to which you refer are
Matthew 1:2-23 in which the angel tells Joseph:

“She
(Mary) will give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus,
because he will save his people from their sins. All this took place to fulfill
what the Lord had said through the prophet, “The virgin will conceive and give
birth to a son, and they will call him Emmanuel which means God with us.”

The
angel is quoting Isaiah 7:14 “Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign.
Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name
Emmanuel.” In around 738BC the prophet Isaiah confronted the bad king Ahaz and
told him that a good king was about to be born who would succeed him. That was
the specific situation to which the prophet was referring. The good king was
named Hezekiah, not Emmanuel. The
prophecy took on a greater meaning in reference to the Chosen One (“Meshiach” in Hebrew, “Christos” in Greek, and “Christ” in
English.) That’s how Heaven works: layers and layers of meaning. We want a
simple meaning: A=B=C, but that’s not how Heaven works.

You
say that you know that Jesus means “God saves”, but it’s much more than that.
Let’s look at the words. Have you ever
considered what the word “god” means?
Our word “god” comes from early German which in turn comes from the Indo‑European
word “ghutóm” which meant “the one
who is invoked”. In other words, our word “god” just means the one to whom
prayers are addressed. It’s not a name. It’s a job description. In other
languages there are other words describing the Supreme Being. In the Semitic
languages, Hebrew, Aramaic, Arabic, the word is “El”. Which simply means the one who is above. In the Latin
languages, Spanish, Italian French etc. the word for god all come from the
Latin word “Deus” which probably
means “the one who shines”. The Greek word “theos”
is also related to the Latin word “deus”.
These are all descriptions, not names.

What’s
in a name? Power! That’s what. When I am dressed up in my little plastic collar
and a perfect stranger calls me “Rich” instead of “Father” I know exactly what
he is saying. He is saying, “I do not acknowledge your supposed authority as a
clergyman”. When a sweet little old lady
who is about 98 years-old calls me “Father” it means she does acknowledge my
authority and I respond by calling her “my child” or “daughter,” she then
giggles. Names are about power. For you to call me by my name means we are
equals, and in God’s sight we are, but there are rolesthat have meaning in human society. Have you ever heard a little
child call his parents by their first names? “Come in for dinner, little
Timmy!” “Not now, Sue and Fred. I’m watching TV.” You just want to go in there
and smack that little tyrant upside the head, which of course you would never
do, even if you wanted to. Still something just rankles. The child is stating
that his parents have no control over him, and probably they don’t.

To
accord someone his title is to acknowledge authority. To call someone by his
name is to claim intimacy and equality. God revealed His name to Abraham in
order to invite Abraham to intimacy with Him. He said His name was YHWH, which
probably comes from the Hebrew word meaning “the cause of existence”. That word
is indescribably sacred among Jews. They never say it. NEVER. NOT EVER. It was
said once a year by the high priest on the Day of Atonement. He would enter the
darkness of the Holy of Holies and say the Divine Name. For 2,000 years, since
the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem, no Orthodox Jew has said that word.

Beginning
in the 6th century AD, in Tiberias on the shores of Lake Galilee, Jewish
sages edited the definitive text of the Hebrew Scripture. They were called the
“Masoretes”, or “Keepers of the Tradition”. People no longer spoke Hebrew, and
since Hebrew was written without vowels, the memory of the correct
pronunciation would be lost. The Masoretes decided to add vowels, but how? The sacred text could not be changed, so they
developed a system of lines and dots that would go above and below the
consonants of the sacred text. This system is called “nikkud”, or in English, simply “vowel points”. When the Masoretes
came to the Sacred Named YHWH, they hesitated to add the correct vowel points,
lest someone inadvertently say the Holy Name correctly, so they added the vowel
points of the word “Adonai”, that is “Lord” which is what the Jews say when
they see the word YHWH in the text of Scripture. This leads to two interesting
sidebars.

If
you read the Hebrew texts as the Masoretes wrote it — that is with the
consonants of YHWH and the vowels of “Adonai”— it comes our “YaHoWaH”, or
“Jehovah”. This word doesn’t seem to have existed before 1520 when it was
invented by a fellow named Galatinus and used by the English Protestant Tyndale
in 1530. To me this is humorous. There are whole religions built on a
mispronunciation. Ain’t no such thing as “Jehovah”.

Another
interesting sidebar is the text, “No one can say Jesus Christ is Lord, except
by the Holy Spirit.” (1Cor. 12:3) St. Paul is saying is that no one can
recognize that Jesus, the Carpenter of Nazareth is YHWH, the God who spoke to
Abraham, Isaac and Jacob unless they are inspired by the Holy Spirit.

Enough
of the sidebars, YHWH the unspeakable name of God has a short form that is
perfectly permitted, “Yah” or “Yahu” or even “Ia”. Anytime you see “yah” in a Hebrew word or name, it refers to
the God whose name we do speak, words such as AlleluIA, (praise YHWH) or EliJAH
(which means my God is YHWH) or ZecharIAH (YHWH has remembered) and finally the
one we are interested in YAHshua (YHWH saves) which is of course known to us in
its modified Greek form, “Jesus”.

The
name Jesus becomes the pronounceable form of the unpronounceable name “YHWH”.
Through Yahshua, we have in intimacy with YHWH. That is why Pope Emeritus
Benedict forbad the use of the Yahweh in the liturgy and in liturgical music.
First it is an insult to Jews who do not pronounce the name and second, it is a
kind of step backwards to address the Cause of Being without acknowledging that
the Cause of Being loves us and wants to save us. We know more about the Holy
Name than Abraham and the patriarchs did. We know the fullness of the Love of
God in the person of Jesus.

So
why Jesus and not Emmanuel? Jesus is the fulfillment of Emmanuel. Remember what
El means, the one who is above. It is not a name. The one who is above, who
slowly revealed His name, the one who causes being, is with us in his incarnate
Son and loves us.

There
is another very important dimension to the name Jesus. It was one of the most
common names, if not the most common, at the time of Christ. He was like us in
all things but sin. I believe that if you could get into a time machine and go
back to the carpenter shop in Nazareth, you wouldn’t be able to pick Jesus out
of crowd of two. He chose to be that ordinary. Jesus was in fact God with us.
God as one of us that’s how much He loved us and loves us still, our humble
Carpenter God. That’s why the angel told Joseph to name Him Jesus.

Friday, January 3, 2014

I guess I don’t think about it. I have never watched the show, but I have
always been a little amazed that people who look like they need regular flea
baths could parlay a business that made duck calls into a lucrative enterprise.
Beyond this I cannot understand why a show about the travails of a family full
of these people could command one of the largest viewing audiences in American
history. The phenomenon could provide
doctorates and government research grants for years to come.

I assume
however that you are referring to the comments one of them made about same-sex
attraction and same-sex marriage that caused a ruckus. I didn’t see that
either. My complete ignorance about the show and the interview that let the
network to placing the family patriarch on “hiatus” will however not stop me
from commenting on the whole business.

My suspicion
is that the Arts and Entertainment Network of Cable TV started the show so that
they could cash in on the enjoyment of mocking a bunch of fundamentalist rubes.
I imagine that they were both pleased and chagrined that the audience loved it
all and took it seriously. The audience, I suspect, sees the Duck People as
quintessential Americans. They have managed to make a small fortune by thumbing
their noses at the world. What could be more American? The clan patriarch, Mr.
Robertson does not own a computer or cell phone and is publicly a
fundamentalist Christian who belongs to White's Ferry Road Church of Christ. It
is a Congregationalist church that believes in “word only”. They believe that
the action of the Holy Spirit is limited to the Bible. That means every man is
his own pope, able to read the Bible without any clerical help. Could anything
be more American?

Here we have
the crux of the problem. Mr. Robertson believes in his own infallibility. So do
his critics. Which one is right? Well, the one who is right is the one who
agrees with your particular opinion — or, perhaps, my particular opinion. I’m
not sure which. I suspect that if I can drown out your voice by yelling louder
than you clearly my opinion is the correct one.
This is a Congregationalist country founded by the followers of John
Calvin. The founders of the republic rejected the idea that there should be an
established religion precisely because the Congregationalist faith of the new
nation could not agree within itself on the nature of truth. They founded a
republic on the principle that we have the right to disagree with each other.

A woman
waited outside the locked doors of the constitutional convention in 1787,
wondering whether the framers had chosen a monarchy or a democracy. When she
asked Benjamin Franklin, “Well, what have you given us?” He responded, “A
republic, madam, if you can keep it.”

The
Congregationalist political experiment has been in doubt for the past two
centuries, and I think it is more in peril now than it has ever been. The
invasion of media into the private thought of citizens could never have been
imagined by the founders of this country. The desire to belong is an
overwhelming human need. “It is not good for man to be alone.” (Gen 2:18) We
are terrified by loneliness, and so we fill the holes in our life with anything
that will drown out the silence. Cell phones, I-pads, Twitter, Facebook, Wi-Fi,
on and on and on.

Do you know
how carbon monoxide works? Our blood has receptors for oxygen. Carbon monoxide
will fit these receptors just as well, but it is poisonous. We can’t take in
oxygen if we have filled the receptors with poison and so we suffocate. One can
put the wrong plug into the wrong outlet. Just because one can do it, doesn’t
mean one should. There will be a fire or some other disaster.

We have
plugged chatter into the holes where dialogue is meant to go. The Duck People
are untroubled by cell phones and email and computers. That, I suspect, is why
they are so fascinating to the American public. They have a confidence in their
own self-worth that left our republic years ago. They don’t care what people
think of them, or at least they seem not to. They have formed their
consciences, right or wrong, they have formed them. They need no external approbation
and this both maddens and fascinates us. It’s who we imagine ourselves to be,
but we haven’t been that independent since the ink finally dried on the
Declaration.

The whole
snafu takes me back to a parish I pastored many years ago. The Inflexibly Tolerant
Committee forbad me to offer the 9AM Mass. It was clear that I was Intolerant
because I called God “Father” and used the word “Lord”. They firmly supported a
woman’s right to kill her unborn child and always used the feminine pronoun in
the readings at Mass. They would often say things like “Jesus and Her
disciples...”, though it was always “the devil and his angels...” (I’m not
making this up).

It was clear
that I was intolerant because I did not do this. And they simply would not
tolerate such behavior. After three years I decided to dialogue with them. At
one point I said to them, “Whatever you do, don’t change the words of Baptism.
I have to sign a statement that says, “This child was baptized in name of the
Father, Son and Holy Spirit.” Not “this
child was baptized in the name of the 9 o’clock Liturgy committee.” They had
been in the habit of having the special priests they brought in for “their”
Mass baptize children in the name of the creator, savior, sanctifier, the
father-mother, the earth mother, the four winds, and anyone else who happened
to come along. I told them that I had a conscience too, and they had no right
to make me sign on to their decisions of conscience.

The next
week, they had a child a baptized in heaven knows whose name. I called the
chancery and all whatever broke out. There were pickets in front of the
rectory, nasty letters to the bishop, calls from the dean and unpleasant faxes
from the chancery. They boycotted the collection, which started, strangely, to
go up. They left the parish which then doubled in size. They sure showed me!

Like the 9
o’clock liturgy committee, the Current Moral Movement, that will tolerate
everything except intolerance claims to be a movement of conscience and that
those who don’t agree are immoral. I was rather impressed by one the critics of
the Duck People who said the Duck People weren’t true Christians and no true
Christian would agree with them. The True Christian commentator knocked 95% of
Christians out of the Church, including its founder, Jesus, and the apostles
Peter and Paul.

When people
in the Current Moral Movement say they are merely following their consciences,
I wonder. My conscience usually disagrees with me about what is good and right.
I keep trying to tell my conscience that if it feels good, it must be good. My
conscience just rolls its eyes when I say that and then starts making me feel
bad. My conscience is constantly telling me I should be good to the poor, share
my money, not eat that second piece of cake and not insult people who really
seem to need a good insulting.

I don’t know.
I wish I was as good a person as the Current Moral Movement people. Their
consciences always seem to agree with what they want. Even more, they are not
content simply to follow their own consciences. They are so concerned for me
that they want me to follow their consciences too. It’s as if they aren’t quite
sure that they are right, and by forcing me to participate, not just allow, but
to approve and participate in their decisions of conscience, and occasionally
to pay for them, they will finally be sure that they were right all along. They
do not concede me the right or the freedom to be immoral, at least as they
define it. Heaven forefend that I should call them immoral. That is hate
speech, which, of course is immoral and increasingly criminal. They can’t yet
stop me from thinking it, but at least they can stop my church and my children
from thinking it.

Our republic
is founded on the right of people to disagree. Our Church is founded on the Way
the Truth and the Life, securely set on the Rock of Peter. The state is a
compulsory society. I must respect and agree with the right of others to
disagree. The Church is a voluntary society. If I don’t hold what it teaches, I
am free to obey my conscience and leave it or not to join it in the first
place. It seems that we have turned things upside down. If I don’t agree with
you, but can outshout you, you must go along with the crowd in order to be part
of the general society. To disagree is criminal hate speech. However, in the
Church if you have the bad taste to point out that my theology or morality runs
counter to the whole history and teaching of the Church, you must be a mean
spirited un-Christian, inflexible, narrow-minded, bigot who isn’t a true
Christian.

I can’t
figure any of it out frankly. Maybe that’s why the Duck People are so
fascinating. They have the freedom of Citizens and the hearts of believers, and
besides, they have really cool beards.

Rev. Know-it-all

About Me

Rev. Know-it-all is the alter ego of Fr. Richard Simon, Pastor of St. Lambert Parish, Skokie, IL.
Now a regular host of Relevant Radio's "Fr. Simon Says", Fr. Simon spent over 20 years "...teaching dead languages to comatose seminarians."
Credits: The Reverend Know-It-All is a parody of Mr. Know-It-All, the alter ego of Bullwinkle J. Moose, a carton character created by Jay Ward (1920-1989).